Science & Education 12: 779–786, 2003. 779 © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
The Project Physics Course, Then and Now
GERALD HOLTON Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
I have been asked to speak today, as the program has it, on “The Project Physics Course, Then and Now.” I do so gladly, but must alert you that it is the story of a roller-coaster ride – up, down, and up again, as you will see. In its first few editions, Project Physics was a nation-wide physics course at the introductory level, chiefly for the 11th- and 12th-grade high-school student in the United States, but also used in some colleges. What the audience of this IHPST meeting may want to know most about is no doubt the way in which the design of the course, in addition to physical science itself, used the history and methodologies of science and the interaction of science and society. I will come to that shortly. But this will be better understood if I say first something about the history by which Project Physics came about, and even what its intended future is.
Beginnings It all started very innocently, and as so often in life, with consequences one could not have foreseen. In 1962, a visitor came into my office at Harvard University’s Physics Department. I had not met him. The young man had an engaging person- ality, and introduced himself as a student, getting his doctorate at Harvard from the Graduate School of Education under Professor Fletcher Watson, who long before had been persuaded by President Conant to change from a professor of astronomy to professor of science education, so as to bolster the Education School in that department. My visitor was James Rutherford, on leave from his position as physics teacher and science supervisor at a high school in California. He came to me with a proposal. As a text for his physics class back home, he had been using my first textbook, titled Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science.What had attracted him to it was that it was not the usual, narrowly conceived text, but included other sciences, primarily astronomy and chemistry; that it used the history of science throughout, from the ancient Greeks and Copernicus to current nuclear physics; and that it also had some philosophy of science – three chapters on the structure and methods in physical science. In writing the book I had in mind that